WHO WE ARE

Our beat is the labor front, broadly defined, both geographically and conceptually. We examine the world of work and workers on the job as well as where they live. We examine the issues that affect their everyday lives, with a particular sensitivity towards human rights abuses, environmental concerns and the U.S. drive for global domination. We record their global struggles and provide analysis of their efforts to empower themselves and transform society to provide greater democratic, human, social, political and economic rights. Each program consists of feature stories, generally interviews, within a historical context, often accompanied by sound from demonstrations, rallies or conferences, and complemented and enhanced by poetry and instrumental or vocal -- people's culture.

Over the years Building Bridges has produced a weekly one hour program, Mondays from 7-8 PM EST, covering local, national and international labor and community issues over radio WBAI-Pacifica 99.5 FM in New York.We also produce half hour version, Building Bridges National, which is distribtued to over 40 broadcast and internet radio stations.

For more information you can contact us at knash@igc.org
In Struggle
Mimi Rosenberg & Ken Nash

Dr. Cornel West on Poverty In America Cornel West, is one of America’s most gifted, provocative, and important democratic intellectuals, now focusing much of his energy on his second national tour to heighten awareness of poverty in the U.S., aggressively committing to stopping Stop & Frisk practices and resisting efforts to privatize public education and against school closings. The national discourse has been focused on the deterioration of the “middle class”. But this framework ignores the plight of thegrowing number of working poor and those not included in the workforce, suffering crushing poverty. Organized labor’s wages and benefits are under threat, chronic, high unemployment persists, increasing numbers of workers are falling off the unemployment benefit rolls and those new jobs created increasingly paying poverty wages. The recent Census shows that more than 46 Million Americans last year were living below the poverty line ($22,314 for a family of 4), the highest level since 1993. However, the rise of poverty has been ignored by politicians and the mainstream media. But,author,lecturer,public intellectual Cornel West is a welcome exception to that reality. He has co-authored the new book “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto” and has been traveling the country broadsiding his message that now is the time to confront the underlying conditions of systemic poverty in America.He’s broadcasting the message that there are nearly 150 million impoverished people in America, who aren’t responsible for Great Recession, yet they pay the price for it. The poor did not create the deindustrialization of America, unmitigated corporate profiteering and greed, more than a decade of foreign wars and unregulated tax benefits for the wealthy. Rather, the housing and jobs crisis the plutocrats created have fostered a poverty unseen in generations, crossing race, age and gender lines. Cornel West places the eradication of poverty in the context of the nation’s greatest moments of social transformation - the abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage, and the labor and civil rights movements. As did Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. West raises ending poverty as the defining civil rights struggle of America’s 21st century. Building on the legacy of Dr. King he asks us to re-examine our assumptions about poverty in America, confront our dormancy and travel the road laid out to undertake to eradicate poverty, to redistribute the wealth and challenge the system that thrives off of inequality.

How Class Works: The RepublaCrats and Their Servant Economy With Jeff Faux, renowned economist, Founding Pres., Economic Policy Institute, author of The Global Class War and The Servant EconomyFaux explains why neither party's leaders have a plan to remedy America's unemployment, inequality, or long economic slide that America's political and economic elite spent so long making. While Republicans and Democrats brawl in public, in effect they have already cut a deal: the “American Dream” will have to be sacrificed. Faux will take us on a historical tour of the rise and fall of the idea that democratic government has a responsibility for shaping the future, delivers a savage indictment of Wall Street financiers and their Washington toadies who promote an age of austerity for the people and an age of gluttony for themselves.

So Rich , So Poor - The Crisis of U.S. Poverty Todaywith. Peter Edelman, Author So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard To End Poverty In America. Prof., Georgetown University Law Center ,he was top advisor to Senator Robert Kennedy and was a member of President Clinton’s administration until he resigned in protest of Clinton’s signing, 16 years ago the Welfare Reform and Reconstruction Act. . Dr. Avis Jones DeWeever, Executive Director of the National Council of Negro Women, who has been described as a change agent, living on the intersection of race and gender and fighting for justice every step of the way. Frances Fox Piven, professor of political science and sociology , Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her latest book is Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven: The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate.The income-level disparity in this country is now wider than at any point since the Great Depression. How can this country be so wealthy yet have a steadily growing number of unemployed and working poor.In the past we took important positive steps without which 25 to 30 million more people would be poor, but poverty fluctuates with the business cycle. The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage growth for half of America’s workers — with even worse results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on those at the top.

What is happening to the people behind the statistics and especially the continuing crisis of young people of color, whose possibility of a productive life too often is lost on their way to adulthood. This is crisis of poverty is the most critical American dilemma of the twenty-first century.

What The Lonmin-Marikana Mining Massacre Says About The New South AfricaWithMazibuko Jara, editor, “Amandla, South Africa’s new progressive magazine Standing for Social Justice”, a leader of the Democratic Left Front in South Africa, bringing together 40 South African social movements into a broad anti-capitalist front, former media officer of the South African Communist Party, and first chairperson of the Treatment Action Campaign challenging big pharma and an AIDS denialist government to win ARV treatment. Jara discuses the current political situation in South Africa in the aftermath of the Lonmin-Marikana mineworker massacre, and its broader context, including internal ANC battles in the lead up to its conference in December and what it means for working class struggles and efforts to build the left

We are proud to announce that Building Bridges has yet another outstanding Media Competition award for excellence from the International Labor Communication Association (ILCA) for our program, "The 99% Occupies Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge"covering the Nov.17 2011 upsurge celebrating the two month anniversay of Occupay Wall Street. The 99% delivered a powerful message that the domination of society by a tiny elite of super-wealthy individuals and corporations who caused the economic crisis and lobby against an effective policies to end it , harnessing government to do their bidding is unacceptable. The day started with massive civil disobedience in Wall Streets and theprotests were capped off by a rally and march over the Brooklyn Bridge by tens of thousands determined to take back and redistribute the wealth of this country to those who created it - the 99%.

What Chicago Teachers Taught UsWithKimberly Bowsky, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) rank and file activist, member of CORE, Council of Rank and File Educators and the CTU House of DelegatesandBrian Jones, former NYC public elementary school teacher, now pursuing a doctorate in urban education, co-narrator of the film “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman” and contributor to the book “Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation”The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has a tentative agreement. Some have proclaimed the strike as the biggest and most inspiring union victory since the 1997 UPS Teamsters strike. While it clearly demonstrates the resilience of unions and the viability of the traditional strike tactic, it also raises the limitations of what even the best led unions can accomplish through collective bargaining alone today. What are the lessons of the CTU strike for N.Y.C.'s school personnel and its students, and for teacher’s unions and public workers across the country facing challenges to their very existence?

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BUILDING BRIDGES BASICS

Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report is broadcast weekly in the N.Y.C. to the Metropolitan area over WBAI, Pacifica on Mondays from 7-8 PM EST. Building Bridges and most WBAI Programs are now being archived for 90 Days. They are also being PodCast. These links will be live ca. 15 minutes after the program ends. To listen, download or PodCast archived shows go to http://archive.wbai.org/allshows.php?sort=nameaz

We also produce half hour version, Building Bridges National, Edition which is distributed to over 40 broadcast and internet radio stations.

Minding Business, a semi-monthly on-line publication of the Preamble Collaborative. Minding Business covers grassroots progressive activism and major federal, state, and local legislative initiatives directed toward increasing employment and countering the anti-worker, anti-consumer and anti-environmental shenanigans of corporations and their friends in political office. Each issue also contains economic news and editorials by Preamble staff and guest writers.

National Interfaith Committee For Worker Justice- people of faith who educate, organize, and mobilize the religious community in the U.S. on issues and campaigns that will improve wages, benefits, and working conditions for workers, especially low-wage workers.